Palestine: The Political Ecology of Disasterby James Petras
www.dissidentvoice.org
April 3, 2007

On
Monday, March 26, 2007 in Northern Gaza, a river of raw sewage and
debris overflowed from a collapsed earth embankment into a refugee
camp driving 3,000 Palestinians from their homes. Five residents
drowned, 25 were injured and scores of houses were destroyed.

The New York Times, Washington
Post and the television media blamed shoddy infrastructure. The
Daily Alert (the house organ of the Presidents of the Major
American Jewish Organizations) blamed the Palestinians who they
claimed were removing sand to sell to construction contractors thus
undermining the earth embankment. The disaster at Umm Naser (the
village in question) is emblematic of everything that is wrong with
US-Israeli politics in the Middle East. The disaster in this isolated
village has its roots first and foremost in Washington where AIPAC and
its political allies have successfully secured US backing for Israel’s
financial and economic boycott of the Palestinian government
subsequent to the democratic electoral victory of Hamas. AIPAC’s
victory in Washington reverberated throughout Europe and beyond -- as
the European Union also applied sanctions shutting off financing of
all new infrastructure projects and the maintenance of existing
facilities. At the AIPAC conventions of 2005 through 2007, the leaders
of both major American parties, congressional leaders and the White
House pledged to re-enforce AIPAC’s boycott and sanctions strategy.
AIPAC celebrated its victory for Israeli policy and claimed authorship
of the legislation. In addition to malnutrition, the policy undermined
all public maintenance projects.

Equally central to the disaster,
Israel’s massive sustained bombing attack on Gaza in the summer of
2006, demolished roads, bridges, sewage treatment facilities, water
purification and electrical power plants. Northern Gaza was one of its
many targets, putting severe strain on already precarious
infrastructure and government budgets -- including the maintenance of
sewage treatment plants and cesspools.

The Israeli economic blockade of Gaza
increased unemployment, poverty and hunger to unprecedented levels.
Out of work Gazans reached over 60% of the population -- large
families with young children were reduced to one meal a day. Family
heads desperately looked for any way to earn funds to buy a pound of
chickpeas, oil, rice and flour for bread. It is possible that forced
by the AIPAC-induced US-EU boycott and Israeli bombing and blockade,
that some desperate workers removed some sand around the cesspool. The
pretext cited by the Presidents of the Major American Jewish
Organizations (PMAJO) for blaming the Palestinian victims for their
own suffering, and exonerating the Israelis, AIPAC and their
congressional clients.

The PMAJO has justified thirty-nine
years of Israeli occupation and criminal neglect of Gaza’s basic
sewage treatment facilities. Israel spends less than 2% on a per
capita basis for basic services in the Occupied Territories that it is
obligated under international law to provide responsibly than it
spends in Israel. The United Nations and Israeli human rights groups
have documented Israel’s callous lack of responsibility toward the
Palestinian civilians under its brutal occupation. It is not
surprising that the Presidents of the Major American Jewish
Organizations can think of nothing better than to blame the destitute
Palestinians for the collapse of a primitive earth embankment and the
horrific deaths.

To the extent that any Palestinian
leader can be held responsible, the finger points to the US and
Israeli-backed PLO and its titular head Abbas who receives whatever
‘humanitarian’ aid flows into Palestine. The tens of millions of
dollars of Palestinian import taxes held by Israeli banks were handed
over to Mahmoud Abbas and his CIA-Mossad liaison, Mohammed Dahlen, to
arm their anti-Hamas vigilantes. Over the past two decades the
US-backed ‘moderate’ PLO leaders and crony ‘capitalists’ have diverted
tens of millions of dollars and euros to their private overseas bank
accounts, with the acquiescence of their European, US and Israeli
patrons. What is a bit of Palestinian corruption if it means propping
up an incompetent group of pliant ‘leaders’?

The plight of the Umm Naser villagers
deluged by their own sewage was neither an act of fate nor a result of
local negligence or theft: It was a direct consequence of all that is
wrong in US-Middle East politics, the taking sides with a brutal
colonial power and its powerful voices and organizations in
Washington. Umm Naser is written large throughout Palestine, Iraq and
Lebanon: Millions of Arab villagers suffer the consequences of
pre-emptive wars to secure Greater Israel as both President Bush and
Vice President have publicly stated in justifying their aggression.
Their commitments follow the Lobby’s script, which ‘coincidentally’ is
exactly what pleases the Israeli Foreign Office.